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A Feminine Mystique All Her Own

Ladue, Mo. - RECENTLY, a biography of Phyllis Schlafly, the Missourian who traveled the country battling the equal rights amendment with a hairdo like a treble clef, arrived to make a case for its subject as one of the most influential figures in modern American political history. Among critics who found this thesis convincing, some faulted the book, saying it failed to reconcile the discrepancies between the antifeminist positions Mrs. Schlafly maintained and the accomplished professional life she has pursued. The book, "Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman's Crusade" (Princeton University Press), is a flattering portrayal but also an impersonal one, largely because the author, Donald T. Critchlow, a historian from Mrs. Schlafly's hometown, St. Louis, conducted his research in archives. The two never sat down for a talk, Mrs. Schlafly, now 81, explained in the sunroom of her brick colonial house here in a suburb of St. Louis one afternoon not long ago, even though it would seem there is still much she has to say.

Mrs. Schlafly's life has become the subject of some fascination for a generation of younger women whose feminist impulses are, in many cases, ignited primarily by issues that present themselves at home. A regular lecturer on college campuses, she is often asked to speak on the subject of balancing work and family. "Feminism has changed the way women think, and it has changed the way men think," Mrs. Schlafly said, "but the trouble is, it hasn't changed the attitudes of babies at all."

For 30 years Mrs. Schlafly's weekly syndicated column has appeared in more than 100 newspapers around the country. In recent weeks she has used it to rail against foreign-language ballots, Title IX, the president's attempt to transfer management of ports to an Arab concern, the "nosy" inquiries of the Census Bureau and a call by members of the National Organization for Women for the resignation of Coach Joe Paterno of Penn State after he expressed sympathy for a football player accused of sexual harassment. "Just a few feminists with a fax machine will smear anyone in their war against football," she wrote in January.

Since shortly after her husband's death in 1993 Mrs. Schlafly has written her column, along with "The Phyllis Schlafly Report," which she distributes through her influential Eagle Forum from the second-floor office of the house she bought when he died. The office is filled with pictures of her old home, a grand limestone built on the bluffs of the Mississippi River in Alton, Ill., in the 1920's, and of her 6 children and 14 grandchildren, many of whom join her for dinner at her home on Sundays.

Much of the house has the feel of a lobby in a distinguished Washington hotel. She has lately moved some of her possessions, including her 4,000-volume library, to the Eagle Forum headquarters a few minutes away, but other beloved pieces remain, among them a grandfather clock and a spinning wheel, both purchased on a family trip to Stratford-Upon-Avon in the mid-1960's. The wheel sits in the corner of Mrs. Schlafly's bedroom, inviting the question -- given her unceasing promotion of the virtues of homemaking -- whether she has ever used it. "No, of course, I didn't use it," she replied.

That Mrs. Schlafly has so passionately endorsed domestic life as the greatest achievement to which a woman might aspire while aspiring to so much more herself, has, of course, infuriated her feminist adversaries for decades.

"In the scale of liberal sins, hypocrisy is the greatest, and they have always considered me a hypocrite," Mrs. Schlafly said. She has never told women, she said, that they shouldn't or couldn't work. "I simply didn't believe we needed a constitutional amendment to protect women's rights," she said. "I knew of only one law that was discriminatory toward women, a law in North Dakota stipulating that a wife had to have her husband's permission to make wine."

By the time she married Fred Schlafly, a prominent St. Louis lawyer, in 1949, she had put herself through Washington University working full time as an ammunition tester, firing rifles and machine guns for the war effort. She had also completed a master's in political science at Harvard. Her mother, a librarian, had supported the family during the Depression, when her father was unable to find work. "I grew up believing that I should support myself," Mrs. Schlafly said.

Mrs. Schlafly first gained national attention in the early 1960's as the force responsible for galvanizing support around Barry Goldwater's presidential bid with her first book, "A Choice Not an Echo." A self-published populist treatise arguing that presidential elections had fallen into the hands of a cabal of Eastern establishment bankers and influence peddlers, the book sold three million copies.

At the time, though, she did not consider her political work a career, but rather "a hobby," as she put it. She cared for her children without the assistance of a nanny, but employed a housekeeper 40 hours a week. She breast-fed each child for six months, and home-schooled her four sons and two daughters through age 7.

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"I was never gone overnight," she said. "I'd drive out to give a speech, and sometimes I'd bring a nursing baby with me. There was always someone outside willing to take care of a baby rather than listen to a long lecture."

And yet she remained quite a force. "Nineteen-sixty-four was the most productive year of my life," Mrs. Schlafly said. "I was running the Illinois Federation of Republican Women; I wrote 'A Choice Not an Echo'; I self-published it; I went to the Republican Convention, wrote a second book, 'The Gravediggers' -- now we're in September -- I was giving speeches for Barry Goldwater and in November I had a baby."

That child, Anne, is now 41. She owns a store in St. Louis, the Kitchen Conservatory, and recently married for the first time. When Mrs. Schlafly's other daughter, Liza, a Princeton graduate, left a partnership at a St. Louis law firm not long ago, her three children already grown, Mrs. Schlafly regarded the decision with bemusement. "She stuck it out through all the difficult years when the children were young, and then she decided to leave," she said, adding, "I've never told my children what to do."

Her husband maintained a less laissez-faire attitude. He encouraged all the children to go to law school, Mrs. Schlafly said. When one son, Bruce, expressed ambivalence, Mrs. Schlafly offered to take the law boards with him. (He became an orthopedic surgeon, but two other sons followed their father's advice.)

When she announced at dinner one evening that she had applied to Washington University's law school and gained admission, her husband balked, saying that she was too busy with her work fighting the equal rights amendment.

"I really didn't understand it because, of course, I could do whatever I wanted to do," Mrs. Schlafly said, laughing, "so I went to one of my sons afterward and said, 'Why do you think he doesn't want me to go?' " He suggested that his mother had everything and that his father might want to hold onto the profession he dominated. She withdrew the application, but within two weeks her husband changed his mind, arguing that a legal education would be a boon to her work on the amendment. She went to law school, graduated and took the Illinois bar exam in Chicago, wearing a wig and disguise to avoid detection by the press.

Mrs. Schlafly's efforts to defeat the amendment succeeded once and for all in 1982, when it fell 3 states short of the 38 needed for ratification. She held a burial party at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington. Until 1971, when a friend invited her to speak about the amendment at a book club in Darien, Conn., she had given little consideration to gender-specific issues. "This friend asked me to talk about the E.R.A. and I said, 'What's that?' " "The Feminine Mystique" had come out eight years earlier, and Mrs. Schlafly maintains that she didn't know about it. History will always link her, though, to its author, Betty Friedan. During the 1970's Mrs. Schlafly, Ms. Friedan and the women's rights leaders Eleanor Smeal and Karen DeCrow were something of a traveling roadshow, arguing and lecturing about the amendment around the country.

"I debated Friedan several times," Mrs. Schlafly remarked. "She was always very ugly to deal with and debate, and made it clear that she hated me. I rejected all press calls to comment on her death; I'm not inclined to say critical things when somebody dies. Of course, I reject all her ideology, most of it based on the absurd notion that the home is a comfortable concentration camp and that the suburban housewife is oppressed by her husband and by society."

If women's lives have vastly improved in the last third of a century, she would credit neither Ms. Friedan's efforts nor her own, but instead the work of consumer product engineers who have created labor-saving devices. "When I got married, all I wanted was a dryer so I didn't have to hang my diapers on a clothesline," she wrote in an e-mail message. "Now, mothers have paper diapers. Et cetera, et cetera."

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A version of this article appears in print on March 30, 2006, on Page F00001 of the National edition with the headline: AT HOME WITH -- PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY; A Feminine Mystique All Her Own. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe